"And we should continue the
work of fixing our broken immigration system—to secure our
borders and enforce our laws and ensure that everyone who
plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich
our system."

The
most obvious point is the most unspoken. Obama's remains,
fundamentally, a "story of race". Despite running in 2008 as a
racial transcender, despite a press cover-up of the
President's autobiography, Obama could not transcend in his
first year in office his
long
history as a
race
man.

"I think the
contradictions that Steve has identified in this book will
turn any Obama Presidency into a four-year
O.J. Simpson trial and that the consequent meltdown will
compare to the Chernobyl of the
Carter
Presidency in its destructive partisan effects."

That the Massachusetts Democrats were
unable to hold onto a Senate seat won by a Kennedy in every
election since 1952 suggests that Peter's
mordant
pessimism about Obama's effectiveness might be on track.

My view: Obama, a relatively cautious man,
still has advantages that might help him hold power to 2017.
For example, he has pervasive MainStream Media bias—and,
most of all, the Republican Party, which is prospering right
now only by being
leaderless and largely idealess.

The President botched the Democrats' best
issue—after all, who isn't driven crazy at some point by
their health insurance provider?—because he originally
defined
ObamaCare as solving what he considers the two big
health care problems:

The citizens who show up to vote in
special and
midterm
elections are more white, more mature, and less
frivolous than those who turn out only in Presidential
elections featuring fad candidates. In other words, people
who take care to vote in off-years also tend to make the
sacrifices necessary to obtain health insurance for their
families.

As
Massachusetts showed, these reliable mostly older white
voters aren't at all sure they trust with their money and
their lives a young black President who sees them as part of
the problem.

My point: It's becoming ever more obvious
that Obama, an unaccomplished
Chicago
politician, was nominated for President for the same
reason
George W. Bush got to run for President—because of
who his daddy was. If
Obama's father were white, he no more would have been
considered Presidential timber than if the last President's
father had been named Smith.

As Obama
admitted in The
Audacity of Hope,
he served "as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes
project their own views". In other words, he's something
of an empty suit. And as he falls from the empyrean heavens
of Hope and Change to the mundane world of governing and
deal-making, he turns out to be a not particularly talented
leader and administrator.

He does have a gift for words (in pleasant
contrast to our last President). Yet Obama lacks the
masterful, confidence-inspiring temperament that
allowed FDR to thrive politically although he had no
clue how to
end
the Depression. Obama tends toward sensitive, moody
self-absorption. Not surprisingly for a man who published
his first autobiography at age 33, he used the word
"I" 104 times in
his State of the Union
address. He seems to need to take a lot of mental health
days on the
golf course.

"First, we will launch a
massive effort to make public buildings more
energy-efficient. … We need to upgrade our federal buildings
by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient
light bulbs. That won't just save you, the American
taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people
back to work."

His
2010 State of the Union ditched the mercifully forgotten
light bulb screwing in scheme in favor of
57 new flavors of pork, along with an
implausible
"discretionary spending freeze".Thus Obama's
appearance at a
rally in Tampa on Thursday trumpeted a new
brainstorm—handing over $1.25 billion for a
Train to Nowhere.

Obama has called for the construction of a
high-speed rail line that will run from the Orlando airport
all of 75 miles to a To Be Announced destination in the
sprawling Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metroplex.

Think
about it. (Obama hasn't.) Rail travel works best connecting
centralized cities. Orlando is hardly centralized. And Tampa
Bay is likely the least suitable metropolitan area in
America for an expensive new rail system: its center is salt
water.

Q. After you
drive to south suburban Orlando International Airport, park,
and wait for the ObamaTrain, it accelerates up to
168 mph but then soon starts decelerating so it can
grind to a halt somewhere near Tampa (meaning it will only
average
86 mph), what do you do next?

A. You stand in line at the
Hertz counter to rent a car to drive to your actual
destination in the far-flung Tampa Bay exurbs. (For example,
it's 25 miles from downtown Tampa to downtown St.
Petersburg.)

Wouldn't it have been simpler and cheaper
just to drive from
Orlando?

Not
surprisingly, Florida voters, who know more about their
geography than Obama, turned down the Train to Nowhere by a
64%-36% landslide in 2004 when they were expected to pay for
it.

Now we
all get to pay for it.

In general,
high-speed rail promises to be a bountiful
job-generating boondoggle for decades for loyal Obama
constituencies such as planners, plaintiff's attorneys, and
environmental activists. Watch as they laboriously rule out
each proposed route by discovering some obscure
Endangered Species of weed or bug, and then go back to
the drawing board, all the while billing at their hourly
rates.

For most Americans outside the densely
populated Boston-Washington corridor, high-speed rail is as
big a joke as, but considerably more expensive than, George
W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union plan for
hydrogen-powered automobiles.

(Remember hydrogen-powered automobiles?)

But
being both a lightweight and not very likable didn't stop
Bush from winning a second term, and it might well not stop
Obama either. After all, to get re-elected, all you have to
do is beat one guy.

Moreover, as my
book
documents, Obama has the advantage of having spent a
lifetime thinking about the politics of race, about the
racial hopes and fantasies of Americans, which is much more
than any GOP leader can say. And how are Republicans
supposed to learn about race if nobody is supposed to teach
them?

Obama is not a quick learner, but he does
learn. In 2000, his decade-old plan of becoming the
second black mayor of Chicago was
crushed when South Side African American voters in a
Democratic House primary scoffed at the racial authenticity
of the
prep-schooled Hawaiian. But after a lengthy
depressive spell, Obama reinvented himself as the black
politician for whom whites would vote so they could
congratulate themselves on contributing to a historic
breakthrough.

That
worked, once. Whether it will work more than once is
uncertain, but don't count Obama out.

Thus
in his State of the Union speech, Obama avoided the topic of
health care for the first 33 minutes. Then, having tried to
establish an I-feel-your-pain mood with the largely white
middle-class audience who follow public affairs, he
attempted to reboot ObamaCare. Now, he's not positioning it
as redistribution—but as a response to the rightful
grievances of people who already have health insurance!

He
claimed:

"I took on health care
because of the stories I've heard from Americans with
preexisting conditions whose lives depend on getting
coverage; patients who've been denied coverage;
families—even those with insurance—who are just one illness
away from financial ruin."

And
the recent Republican counter-strategy is seriously
vulnerable. They simply position themselves as the mirror
image to Obama's
"blank screen" by running ruggedly handsome white guys
upon whom hopes can be projected, such as Senator
Scott Brown in Massachusetts and
Governor Bob McDonnell in Virginia.